Featured Staff Member

Toi Whakaari employs the country’s leading professionals to teach all the courses we have on offer. Our tutors are also practising professionals and have worked extensively in theatre, film and television both nationally and internationally and bring this experience and contacts to their teaching. In this section you can get to know them a bit better…

Nathaniel Lees

Senior Tutor, Acting for Stage & Screen

A recent addition to the acting staff, Nathaniel has been an actor and director for almost 30 years. Born and bred in Auckland, he is of Samoan descent himself and has a prestigious directing career throughout Aotearoa and the Pacific which includes such productions as The Songmaker’s Chair by Albert Wendt and Awhi Tapu by Albert Belz, as well as John Kneubuhl’s Think of a Garden and the Kightley/Fane play A Frigate Bird Sings (both winners of Chapmann Tripp awards for Production of the Year and Director of the Year). He is also known for his many acting roles, from NZ television series and productions such as Xena: Warrior Princess and 30 Days of Night, to blockbusters such as The Matrix Trilogy and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. This year (2011) he is involved in The Hobbit, and he has also been working in Samoa as one of the Associate Producers for the new feature film The Orator (O Le Tulafale), which has been selected for the 68th Venice Film Festival in early September. He works with acting students at Toi Whakaari on acting for stage and screen.

What are you working on at the moment?

Voice for film with the 2^nd years: acting classes and Shakespeare monologues with the 1^st years; making selections for Toi Film 2012; and directing Spelling Bee the musical with the 2^nd years (The 25^th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, 18 – 22 October).

What’s the most rewarding thing about your job?

The students achieving growth within their craft – you see this over the three years that they study. I also gain a greater understanding of my own work in the craft of acting and drama – after 30 years I’m still learning, so there’s a lot of that, about how to do what I’ve done for so long, and about translating that into something that I can pass on.

Great news about The Orator being selected for Venice – congratulations!

Yes, it’s great: it’s a film the NZ Film Commission supported, all in the Samoan language with English subtitles, shot in Samoa, and all the actors (bar one) live in Samoa. It’s great that it’s done so well but I’m really not surprised: it’s been a project that I’ve always thought had the potential to be showcasing the Pacific on the world stage. I think, and several others think with me, that the next big move is going to be stories from the Pacific that people want to see: and Tulefale is one of them. Tulefale is the Orator who stands, a talking chief who reaches up to the tokotoko, the orator’s staff or talking stick, and speaks on behalf of the village. The main character is a dwarf who can never reach the talking stick, so it’s all about this dwarf’s aspirations as well as perception and outward appearances: how people perceive, and how it can be completely wrong.

How important is it that the film is in Samoan?

Enormously important. It’s the first full-length feature to be shot in Samoa and fully in the Samoan language. So, generations of Samoans have been born around the world and never seen Samoa, never heard it spoken in a day to day context, this is something they’re waiting for.

What are you working on outside school?

I’m working on The Hobbit, although I can’t say what! – also Mister Pip, the film of Lloyd Jones’s book by Andrew Adamson, which finished shooting in Papua New Guinea four weeks ago and started last week back in NZ. There are scenes in Victorian England, so we all went down to Oamaru, which is the nearest thing we have to that in New Zealand, for the outside locations.

Another story from the Pacific: why do you say that the Pacific is going to be the next big move?

Because we’re really interesting people! European and American stories have reached a saturation point. Us in the Pacific, we are almost a sophisticated place, but we are also close to who we actually are so our stories reflect that. We are not so overlaid with guns, fast cars, money – though we’re gradually moving towards that – but where we actually are in this moment of cultural development is going to be hugely interesting. Once Were Warriors was a huge thing, but that was just the start, and now we have other stories.

Tell me about your Samoan background?

My parents are Samoan – I am Samoan. That’s where I feel the connection. I was born and raised in New Zealand, but I try to get back once every three or four years. I can never remember not having a connection to Samoa. My father and mother spoke Samoan all the time, so that’s what I always thought I was, as opposed to my brothers and sisters, who consider themselves more New Zealanders. So it’s a very personal connection.

In terms of bi-culturalism, that’s very much an aim of this school. Do you think it does that effectively?

Yes it does – it’s in the name, Toi Whakaari. Annie started it, Christian is championing it. And I find it really interesting that people are starting to call it Toi Whakaari rather than the National Drama School. We know where we’re going. And the way that Toi Whakaari is moving into the culture of the sharing of knowledge – the marae concept – is something that is not foreign to me at all being Samoan. The sharing puts it all into perspective: there’s a sense of responsibility to pass on that knowledge, and a responsibility of the young ones to observe and absorb that knowledge, not just sit back and let it happen but actively take part to learn. And watching that learning is absorbing. That culture is starting to grow quite strongly now and it’s recognised as a shift in the learning experience.

Is this the way of the future?

Yes it is the way of the future. Other people have come to observe how we’re doing this here at Toi Whakaari, and again this is my thinking about the Pacific, also in the way we actually learn. True learning is always based on sharing and that’s what we do here.